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This electrical transmission tower has a problem

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Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#211

Post by viraptor »

techie128 wrote: post #199
legulere wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000 fires would actually be probably better than 10 because they help keep flammable material at bay and reduce the size of the fires.

This is a ridiculous argument. Why don't we forcefully tear down all of PG&E's infra every few years. They'll be forced to rebuild it with the latest safety standards... smh

It lacks context, but the idea itself is not ridiculous. That's pretty much how original Australians dealt with fuel buildup. Move and burn often. Given specific ecosystem, in a very literal sense, 1000 fires are better than 10 in the same area over the same time period.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#212

Post by dcanelhas »

tuna-piano wrote: post #65
nanodeath wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm...it's unclear whether you read the stream. They had reason to believe that the C-hook would fail after 97-100 years, yet weren't even checking the C-hooks on towers that were 100 years old. That seems willfully negligent.

I think the point is that PG&E negligently caused sparks. But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes. Even among power operators, sparks seem to not be too rare (for example, the tree that fell on the line). So while PG&E can be blamed for that specific fire that doesn't really address the root cause of "why can some sparks in one place cause such huge destruction and c…

One cannot reasonably blame them for all fires, but one can reasonably blame them for fires with a direct causal link to their negligence.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#213

Post by petertodd »

formerly_proven wrote: post #206
43920 wrote: post #60

This is definitely a failure on PG&E's part, but I'm still not sure how much sense it makes to assign them blame for this fire. The environment they're operating in is somewhat ridiculous - the forest is so dry and overgrown that pretty much any flame source will start a fire large enough to burn a huge area; this specific tower failure is basically just the thing that revealed a much larger issue. With proper engine…

> With proper engineering This tower looks weird. Overhead three-phase transmission is super common in the EU and I've never seen anything like this "transposition tower" that swaps the wires around in the air and I don't really see why it would make much sense to do so mid-line. Wouldn't it be easier to swap the wires around at the start or end of a line, or inside a substation? Also, as far as I can tell (from some…

Swapping the wires around at the start or end of the line doesn't swap them frequently enough. It's actually quite like a twisted pair in an ethernet cable: you swap the order frequently to average out the different position-dependent electrical characteristics to get a uniform characteristic.

The EU probably does that less frequently simply due to higher density, and thus fewer long stretches of transmission line. I've personally seen a transposition tower in the EU on a line running across a mountain, so they do exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_tower

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#214

Post by himinlomax »

formerly_proven wrote: post #206
43920 wrote: post #60

This is definitely a failure on PG&E's part, but I'm still not sure how much sense it makes to assign them blame for this fire. The environment they're operating in is somewhat ridiculous - the forest is so dry and overgrown that pretty much any flame source will start a fire large enough to burn a huge area; this specific tower failure is basically just the thing that revealed a much larger issue. With proper engine…

> With proper engineering This tower looks weird. Overhead three-phase transmission is super common in the EU and I've never seen anything like this "transposition tower" that swaps the wires around in the air and I don't really see why it would make much sense to do so mid-line. Wouldn't it be easier to swap the wires around at the start or end of a line, or inside a substation? Also, as far as I can tell (from some…

You don't see those hooks things in Europe because I doubt we have any high voltage lines that old left. I suspect this one survived that long because of the much drier California climate.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#215

Post by lmilcin »

Let's be clear, the fires are not fault of PG&E. Once the forest has not burned for long eonough and is dry enough any spark is going to cause large scale fire. It just happens that PG&E tends to cause a lot of sparks.

Simulations show (and logic says) that the frequency with which a piece of land has a fire depends on humidity, not amount of sparks. If the forest is dry enough any fire spreads unimpeded and even if you have less sparks you just get larger fires.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#216

Post by TeMPOraL »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #48
causality0 wrote: post #21

"Paying money to violate the law" is a fundamentally broken method of law enforcement. Do away with them. Justice should not be a line item in a spreadsheet. Maybe it's only twenty minutes in the county jail but every single infraction should fall personally on the individual who made the decision. Start hauling board members into court in orange jumpsuits and see how quickly these "unavoidable" fuckups stop happenin…

How do we decide who is “personally responsible”? Wells Fargo’s tellers were the ones personally responsible for the fraud, but that was due to unreasonable targets set by management.

That's where an org chart comes in. You find the people directly responsible, and walk up the chart until you reach the point you can't prove a person could be reasonably aware of what their sub^n-ordinates were doing. All people you collected up to that point should then be put in front of a judge.

That's just a restating of an idea that superiors are responsible for the actions of their subordinates. I think it's called "vicarious liability", though IANAL.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#217

Post by resonantjacket5 »

tshaddox wrote: post #155
43920 wrote: post #60

This is definitely a failure on PG&E's part, but I'm still not sure how much sense it makes to assign them blame for this fire. The environment they're operating in is somewhat ridiculous - the forest is so dry and overgrown that pretty much any flame source will start a fire large enough to burn a huge area; this specific tower failure is basically just the thing that revealed a much larger issue. With proper engine…

> With proper engineering and maintenance, PG&E could probably reduce the frequency of fires significantly, but there's always going to be a non-zero risk of fire, both from power lines and other sources, and it seems basically inevitable that one of them would have started another fire at some point. I don’t understand. You’re conceding that if PG&E were a competent and responsible company they could significantly r…

No the root of the problem is that there's too much forest that hasn't burned. Blaming PG&E is missing the actual problem.

For instance the Beirut explosion was the fault from the welders causing the explosion. Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place? California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue. These forests should be periodically burned the remove rather than letting them accumulate into such a large blazing fire.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#218

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

viraptor wrote: post #211
techie128 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a ridiculous argument. Why don't we forcefully tear down all of PG&E's infra every few years. They'll be forced to rebuild it with the latest safety standards... smh

It lacks context, but the idea itself is not ridiculous. That's pretty much how original Australians dealt with fuel buildup. Move and burn often. Given specific ecosystem, in a very literal sense, 1000 fires are better than 10 in the same area over the same time period.

I lived in Africa. The parks used to run controlled burns, every year or two, of the savanna grass.

They tended to do this during the [very] wet season.

But PG&E is still on the hook for taking better care of their infrastructure.

It all comes down to dollars and [non]sense. Some actuary has determined that an occasional lawsuit and rotten press run is cheaper than maintaining the wires.

Here in New York, many of the buried water mains that transfer water to the city from upstate are well over a century old. Many are made of cast iron, and even wood.

There’s no plan to dig them up and replace them with more robust materials. They just wait for them to fail, then replace the small part that failed.

They do give city water some real taste, though. It’s probably actually nutritious.

Re: This electrical transmission tower has a problem

#219

Post by setum »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #178
xyzzyz wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you understood my comment. PG&E is as regulated as you can possibly get without literally being part of government. When PG&E wants to spend $100M on maintenance, it has to ask government for permission, and CPUC needs to approve this expense. My point here is not to argue that with less regulation, PG&E would do better job when it comes to maintenance — I don’t know if it would. However, considering ho…

> When PG&E wants to spend $100M on maintenance, it has to ask government for permission, and CPUC needs to approve this expense. ...and did they ask? It's their job to ask. You can't blame the oversight organization's interference if it didn't interfere.

If you have to ask a government committee every time you go to washroom, you will notice a significant drop in your washroom visits.
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